AppAdviceAppOfTheWeekForJan.6,2014

Every week, our staff will handpick an app from the past two weeks that we believe is a must-download for your iPhone or iPad. These apps will always be from various categories, but they are chosen because our own staff members love it and have been using them daily. So here are this week’s picks! Enjoy!

Shoots & Leaves

Ever use your iPhone to take a picture for a reminder of a task later? Then your Camera Roll may be cluttered up with one-time use photos. Worry no more, because our App of the Week is here to save the day: Shoots & Leaves.

This slick and simple little app has one purpose: to upload those images and turn them into links attached to task items that you can keep in your to-do app of choice. This will reduce the amount of those task images in your camera roll, leaving that to actual memories and special events.

Shoots & Leaves features a clean and elegant interface that fits in with iOS 7, and is fairly straightforward to navigate around, even if you don’t read everything in the tutorial. It launches automatically into the Camera mode so you can snap the photo at a moments notice.

Once you have the image captured, it will be uploaded to imgur by default, though you can choose to use your CloudApp or Dropbox account for image storage. Give it a title, and then the app will create a to-do item in your app of choice (default is Reminders). You can also send to other third-party apps like OmniFocus or Drafts, or just email, send as message, open in Safari, or copy the Markdown link. That’s the gist of the app — shoot your image, name it, and send it off to your to-do manager so you’ll remember it later without having to clog up that Camera Roll.

Honorable Mention

Steps+

It’s a new year, so it’s time to get active and healthy. And to help you keep track of how much you move, our Honorable Mention, Steps+, is here to help you stay on track.

This simple and minimal app has an interface that is perfect for iOS 7. Steps+ will also make use of the M7 chip in your iPhone 5s handset to keep track of exactly how many steps you take throughout the day. Fortunately, it will also fetch the past week of data so you don’t start out with an empty screen.

Information is laid out in an easy-to-read manner, with the focus on the current day’s steps, as well as a cumulative total from the past seven days. You also get an estimated calories burned count, which can help you with your dieting goals for the new year.